Notes on the AtrocitiesLike a 100-watt radio station, broadcasting to the dozens...

Friday, June 25, 2004

The Critics Have Spoken

You can judge one's relative importance by the vehemence of the opposition (which is why I try to cultivate trolls). By this measure, Michael Moore has, with the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, arrived.

National ReviewEven though Moore's current status ultimately says more about the impoverished state of liberal thought than it does about Moore himself, it's nevertheless worth spending a moment tracing the way his mind actually works. This involves a kind of cognitive spelunking, a slow, steady descent into a dark, dank, drafty abyss. It cannot be that the man is an idiot, in the clinical sense; his conspiracy theorizing demonstrates genuine inventiveness, his previous films exhibit a rudimentary sense of irony, and the nervous laughter that punctuates his interviews indicates a marginal awareness that he might be making an a** of himself.

Christopher "trust me cause I useta be liberal" HitchensTo describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

Jeff Jarvis/BuzzMachine (who has links to a bunch of conservative blogger reviews)
After leaving the theater and walking by the black man now shaking his head at what Moore had wrought and the people with bring-down-Bush clipboards, I made my way back to New Jersey through the PATH train at the World Trade Center where, most of you know, I was on 9/11. And now I was shaking my head. Michael Moore did not present bin Laden and the terrorists and religious fanatics (from other lands) as the enemy who did this. No, to him, our enemy is within. To him, our enemy is us. And that's worse than stupid and sad and it's most certainly not entertaining. It's disgusting.

Washington TimesThis blanket indictment probably is welcomed by much of the Democratic Party base, but Michael Moore is far too shoddy and unreliable as a muckraker to substantiate any particular charge. He may suffer from genuine attention-deficit problems; his preferred method is to belabor a charge for a few minutes, then shift to another one before anything resembling plausible confirmation or corroboration accumulates.